Weis supermarket opens Norristown beer café

Weis Markets opened an in-store beer café in its East Norriton, Pa. location this week as part of its continued growth to meet customer expectations and growing trends.

The 35-seat East Norriton, Pa. location (25 W. Germantown Pike) will be its second in-store café in the Philadelphia region, and will have 300 varieties of beer available both for take-out and on premise drinking.

The addition of beer cafés in its supermarkets is just one part of the Sunbury, Pa-based company's focus on continued growth, and its goal of meeting customer expectations, said Dennis Curtin, spokesman for Weis Markets.

“A beer café is a natural evolution of our business,” said Dennis Curtis, spokesman for Weis. “Supermarkets sell so much food for on-premise consumption. And, given how that’s evolved over the years, it was just a logical step for us to set up cafés and sell beer."

Furthermore, Curtin said: “The thing about the cafés that we opened — what we hear from customers — is that they love its convenience. It saves them an extra shopping trip, and that it really works for a lot of customers.”

The beer café is separated from the supermarket, as per Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board regulations, and is connected to the market’s deli and food service section.

A café in Doylestown, Pa. opened on July 16, with plans of opening a third café in Conshohocken, Pa. in the fall, pending Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. The company currently has 20 beer cafés.

Along with beer café, the company is also diving into new trends such as gluten-free, organic, specialty and local products.

“One thing we’re diligently doing is being locally relevant and having local products that customers expect,” Curtin said. “An excellent example is we buy 25 million pounds of local produce every year."

Weis also processes its own milk in dairy plants next to its support center in Sunbury, Pa. The butter fat generated is then taken to an ice cream plant to make 70 flavors of ice cream.

The company plans to invest $100 million in its United States stores this year, and has invested $500 million in the last few years, Curtin said. Money is spent on renovating and updating each location. Along with remodeling three of its stores in the Philadelphia region, a replacement store will be opened in Selinsgrove, Pa.

Weis Markets currently operates 163 stores in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia. But, due to varying liquor laws, Pennsylvania is the only state that has beer cafés. Locations in West Virginia sell beer and wine on shelves, while locations in New York only sell beer on its shelves.